This month, we’re digging into what it means to organize on a 500-year clock with a new One Million Experiments Podcast discussion guide. As our co-creator, Mariame Kaba says, “We don’t have to be on a capitalist timeline.”
In our first newsletter, Mariame discussed the driving ideas behind One Million Experiments. Today, we’re asking you to share the projects paving the way toward plenitude in your communities. In 500 years, what will the fruits of our collective experiments look like?
Free Postcard Set Giveaway
The first 50 people to submit a project to the One Million Experiment site will receive a free set of 500-year clock postcards, perfect for spreading your vision of abundance for 2523.
What counts as an experiment? Submit any project that you know about that is driven by community members for community members. How are people in your neighborhood building relationships? What groups are creatively filling the gaps in resources and services in your area? What models exist in your region that people could use for inspiration in other places?
Organizing On A 500-Year Clock
“Everything that's going on has an origin and a legacy,” Mariame Kaba says. “And if you understand that, I feel like you're a lot more patient.” We don’t know how our actions today will impact the future. "You just do the work now by asking better questions than what you were asking six months before then. That's the best we can do."1
Organizing on a 500-year clock does not mean organizing with only future generations in mind; it emphasizes organizing informed by past generations. Ella Baker put it like this: “One of the things that has to be faced is, in the process of wanting to change that system, how much have we got to do to find out who we are, where we have come from and where we are going.” We are building on the foundation of what came before us, and we are laying the groundwork for the building that will continue after us. Baker explains that “in order to see where we are going, we not only must remember where we've been, but we must understand where we have been. This calls for a great deal of analytical thinking and evaluation of methods that have been used. We have to begin to think in terms of where do we really want to go and how can we get there.”2
Plotting a way forward by taking into account where we have been, as Baker counsels, enables us to move strategically. Hindsight also teaches us how hard it can be to predict the outcomes of our actions far into the future. “The temporality of organizing and the temporality of living,” Mariame says, “should condition you to be humble because you don't know how what you're doing today will impact the future, or if it will impact the future.” At first glance, this thought may seem discouraging, but for Mariame the uncertainty of the future is a source of hope. “You never know what will happen," she says, “Let go of your deep desire to want to control that. Focus on your next right step, and the one after that.”3
It’s challenging to imagine what abolition is going to look like in 500 years because our path is unlikely to be a direct one. “Abolition is nonlinear,” Tiffany Lenoi, a New York-based healer, says. “That’s why we’re able to be changing the present while living in the future now.”4 One Million Experiments is meant to show a tiny fraction of the many different directions developing at the same time. Just like there is no single alternative that will replace police or prisons, there is no single path leading to liberation. Abolition is the roadmap we’re collectively building and liberation is a point where our many paths converge — until everybody’s free. As Mariame says, “We’ve got a hell of a long time before we’re going to see the end. Right now, all we’re doing is building the conditions that will allow the thing to happen.”
When we say we’re organizing on a 500-year clock, we acknowledge the building blocks it took for us to get where we are, and how many building blocks it’s going to take to get to where we need to go. Our hope is that One Million Experiments acts as a source of inspiration for block builders.
To dig deeper into this idea, we’ve created a new discussion guide that highlights three projects in the One Million Experiments collection. These projects explore how small acts can create opportunities for larger changes, and challenges readers to be imaginative and bold in the name of liberation. As Rosa Parks wrote, “to bring about change, one must not be afraid to take the first step, or else it will not be done. I believe that the only failure is failing to try.”5
You can also download our first discussion guide, a great way to bring the One Million Experiments Podcast into classrooms and group discussions, or for anyone interested in activating their abolitionist imagination.
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Kandist Mallett, Mariame Kaba, Abolitionist and Author, on We Do This Til We Free Us, Teen Vogue, March 26, 2021.
Ella Baker, The Black Woman In the Civil Rights Struggle: A Long View, Address given at the Institute of the Black World, Atlanta, Georgia, December 31, 1969.
Laura Newberry, When the world feels like it’s caving in, can hope for the future dig us out? Los Angeles Times, November 8, 2022.
Barbara Sostaita, Free Radicals: Abolition’s Roots in Healing Are a Key to Its Future, Bitch Media, July 1, 2020.
Rosa Parks with Gregory J. Reid, Dear Mrs. Parks: A Dialogue With Today’s Youth, New York City: Lee & Low Books, 1996.